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Policy-making in the European Union has been severely criticized for a lack of democratic legitimacy. In an effort to counteract the ongoing criticism, the Commission has taken various initiatives to increase interest group participation. This article therefore sheds light on the democratic potential of this participation in European policy-making by analyzing which interest groups are represented in Brussels, how these groups are organized and how much influence they have on policy outcomes in the Union. Adapted from the source document.

Why does lobbying success in the European Union (EU) vary across interest groups? Even though this question is central to the study of EU policy-making, only few have dealt with it. The small number of existing studies is moreover characterized by a multitude of hypotheses and contradictory findings. This article aims to overcome these shortcomings by presenting a theoretical exchange model that identifies information supply, citizen support and economic power of entire lobbying camps as the major determinants of lobbying success. The hypotheses are empirically evaluated based on a large new dataset. By combining a quantitative text analysis of interest group submissions to Commission consultations with an online survey among interest groups, the theoretical expectations are tested across a large number of policy issues and interest groups while controlling for individual interest group and issue characteristics. The empirical analysis confirms the theoretical expectations indicating that lobbying is a collective enterprise. Adapted from the source document.

Why are some interest groups able to successfully feed their preferences into the policy-making process in the European Union whereas others fail in their lobbying attempts? This study argues that lobbying success can largely be explained by the information that interest groups supply to the European Commission, the Council and the European Parliament. What is decisive is however not the provision of information by individual interest groups, but the information supply by entire lobbying coalitions composed of interest groups fighting for the same policy objective. Based on a quantitative text analysis of Commission consultations, the theoretical expectations are empirically tested based on a multilevel analysis of 2696 interest groups and 56 policy initiatives. Adapted from the source document.

Information supply is an important instrument through which interest groups can exert influence on political decisions. However, information supply to decision-makers varies extensively across interest groups despite the common objective to influence policy-making. Drawing on resource mobilisation and organisational theory, a new theoretical framework is developed that identifies organisational characteristics, more specifically the resources, the functional differentiation, the professionalisation and the decentralisation of interest groups as determinants of information supply. These theoretical expectations are tested based on a large new dataset. Using multilevel modelling, this article examines information supply to the European Commission across a large number of policy issues and interest groups by combining an analysis of consultation submissions with a survey conducted among interest groups. The findings confirm the theoretical expectations suggesting that interest groups cannot equally exploit their access to decision-makers, but that resource endowment and organisational structures play a crucial role for effective informational lobbying. Adapted from the source document.

Does lobbying success in the European Union vary systematically across interest group type? Interest groups lobby the European institutions in order to achieve policy decisions that are in line with their own preferences. While some argue that different types of interest groups are equally able to shape European policy-making, others contend that lobbying success is systematically biased towards some powerful interest groups. The empirical evidence is contradictory as previous studies focused either on a specific interest group type or on a specific policy area so that it is difficult to draw general conclusions. This study therefore presents an extensive empirical analysis of lobbying success across a wide variety of interest groups and policy issues by combining a quantitative text analysis of Commission consultations with an online survey among interest groups. The findings are promising as they indicate that lobbying success does not vary systematically across interest group type. Adapted from the source document.

Why are some interest groups able to lobby political decisions successfully whereas others are not? This article suggests that the issue context is an important source of variation because it can facilitate or hamper the ability of interest groups to lobby decision-makers successfully. In order to test the effect of issue characteristics, this article draws on a new, unprecedented data set of interest group lobbying in the European Union. Using quantitative text analysis to analyse Commission consultations, this article studies lobbying success across 2696 interest groups and 56 policy issues. The findings indicate that lobbying success indeed varies with the issue context, depending on the relative size of lobbying coalitions and the salience of policy issues, whereas individual group characteristics do not exhibit any systematic effect. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

The increasing transfer of competencies to the European level together with the growing heterogeneity of European interest federations puts national interest groups under extensive pressure. In order to guarantee the representation of their interests at the European level, they have to lobby the European institutions directly. However, not all national interest groups do so. This article therefore analyses under what conditions national associations engage at the European level. A theoretical framework is developed, combining resource mobilization theory with rational choice institutionalism. It is empirically tested in a comparative case study of lobbying strategies of French and German agricultural interest groups in the Doha Round. Drawing on a comprehensive survey conducted in 2006/07, this study combines a comparative research design with the new multi-value qualitative comparative analysis. The main conclusion is that resources as well as the domestic national institutional context determine whether national interest groups Europeanize their lobbying strategies. Adapted from the source document.

The analysis of interest group influence is crucial in order to explain policy outcomes and to assess the democratic legitimacy of the European Union. However, owing to methodological difficulties in operationalizing influence, only few have studied it. This article therefore proposes a new approach to the measurement of influence, drawing on quantitative text analysis. By comparing interest groups' policy positions with the final policy output, one can draw conclusions about the winners and losers of the decision-making process. In order to examine the applicability of text analysis, a case study is presented comparing hand-coding, WORDSCORES and Wordfish. The results correlate highly and text analysis proves to be a powerful tool to measure interest groups' policy positions, paving the way for the large-scale analysis of interest group influence. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

How does ideological congruency affect the speed of legislative decision-making in the European Union? Despite the crucial importance of actor preferences, the effect of partisan alignments and ideological composition of the European institutions has largely been neglected. However, we argue that the ideological congruence between legislative bodies has an important effect on the duration of policy-making. We test our theoretical expectations based on a large new dataset on decision-making speed in the European Union using event history analysis. The findings confirm our theoretical claim indicating that the ideological distance between the European institutions slows down policy-making which has important implications for the problem-solving capacity of political systems more generally. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

While Europarties have received increasing attention in recent years, little is known about how they arrive at common policy positions, given their strong internal ideological heterogeneity. In order to explain position formation within Europarties, this article argues that national parties compete with each other in an attempt to upload their own policy positions to their Europarty. The article hypothesizes that their ability to succeed in these attempts depends on their legislative resources. The argument is tested by analysing position formation within the four major Europarties for all European Parliament elections between 1979 and 2004. The empirical results confirm that position choice is skewed towards parties with a large seat share, which has important implications for political representation in Europe. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractHow does voter polarisation affect party responsiveness? Previous research has shown that political parties emphasise political issues that are important to their voters. However, it is posited in this article that political parties are not equally responsive to citizen demands across all issue areas. The hypothesis is that party responsiveness varies considerably with the preference configuration of the electorate. More specifically, it is argued that party responsiveness increases with the polarisation of issues among voters. To test these theoretical expectations, party responsiveness is analysed across nine West European countries from 1982 until 2013. Data on voter attention and voter preferences with regard to specific policy issues from a variety of national election studies is combined with Comparative Manifestos Project data on parties' emphasis of these issues in their election manifestos. The findings have major implications for understanding party competition and political representation in Europe.

How responsive are political parties to the issue priorities of voters? While there are numerous studies that examine policy position congruence between parties and voters or government responsiveness, we know little about the extent to which parties adjust their policy priorities to the issue concerns of voters. Following saliency and issue ownership theory, we argue that political parties listen to their voters by emphasizing policy issues in their election manifestos that have been prioritized by citizens. However, in line with second-order election theory, we expect that issue responsiveness varies with the electoral context. To test our theoretical expectations, we generated a novel dataset that combines data on issue attention of political parties from the Comparative Manifesto and the Euromanifesto projects with data on policy priorities of voters from the European Election Studies, the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and various national election studies. We empirically test our theoretical claims based on a comprehensive analysis of 104 parties from 17 countries competing in 84 national and European elections from 1986 to 2011. Our findings have important implications for political representation in Europe. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

Since political scientists were introduced to the concept of 'the scope and bias of the pressure system' by Schattschneider more than half a century ago, we have grappled with the lack of a standard against which to assess bias. Still, scholars have c

Since political scientists were introduced to the concept of 'the scope and bias of the pressure system' by Schattschneider more than half a century ago, we have grappled with the lack of a standard against which to assess bias. Still, scholars have c